Surprise!

Richard A. Posner writes,

it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures...

The problem isn't just that people find it extraordinarily difficult to take novel risks seriously; it is also that there is no way the government can survey the entire range of possible disasters and act to prevent each and every one of them...

Illustrating the psychological and political difficulty of taking novel threats seriously, the commission's recommendations are implicitly concerned with preventing a more or less exact replay of 9/11.

Absolutely. But we've got to blame someone.

Redaculous

Via Radley Balko:

They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

Redactions are "those portions that are blacked out or otherwise made unreadable". Groan.

Delusions I

Mindles H. Dreck links to a 2001 letter from TIMOTHY ROSCOE CARTER

I. Everything the US does is wrong. In a previous column, you asked: What should we do about a repressive regime?
Option 1) Military Aid. Obviously wrong. We are providing the weapons that kill the innocent. See Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Reagan-era Iraq, etc.
Option 2) Economic Aid. Wrong. We are financially propping up the regime. See Egypt, Indonesia, etc.
Option 3) Humanitarian Aid. Still Wrong. By relieving the regime of its financial duty to feed its people, we free up their money for military uses. See Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban by providing $43 million in humanitarian aid in exchange for the Taliban not exporting Heroin, thus sacrificing 12 million women to the alter of the failed War on Drugs.
Option 4) Trade / Constructive Engagement. Wrong. This is merely an excuse for US corporations to profit off of the regime's repression of its own people. See China and Reagan-era South Africa.
Option 5) Economic Sanctions. Wrong. The economic sanctions in Iraq have killed 6,000 people a month for the past 11 years, or nearly 800,000 victims of US foreign policy.
Option 6) Military Attack. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! See every military conflict that the United States has every engaged in. (Caveat: There may be a possible exception for the US Civil War, which will be considered obviously justified if you are talking to any white person born in the former Confederacy.)
Option 7) The Prime Directive. Wrong. It is intolerable for the most powerful nation in history to sit by and do nothing while thousands die. It probably stems from a racist lack of concern for people of color of persons of other religions. See Rwanda, Bosnia (not to be confused with Kosovo, which falls under Option 6, above).

II. The US gets all the blame, but never any of the credit.
When Lefties take a breather from blaming us for all the misery in the world, they sneer about how unfavorably we compare to Western Europe. So where would Western Europe be without past heavy-handed intervention by the United States? Without the US in WWI, WWII, the Marshall Plan, the Cold War? Ruled by Fascism, Nazism, or Communism? Or maybe still ruled by hereditary Monarchs? Personally, I see Europe and Japan as US success stories.

III. If you can't say something mean, don't say anything at all. Have you ever heard a Left opinion about Kashmir? There may be one, but I can't find it. In 1999, Pakistani forces entered Indian-controlled Kashmir. Two nuclear powers were shooting at each other, so I thought it was important. I tried to follow it in the news but no mainstream source was reporting anything about it. So I turned to Democracy Now! and other "alternative" sources. And I heard... Nothing. The blanket of "censorship" had covered them just like it had covered the corporate media. I had to spend weeks reading foreign sources on the internet for weeks to stay informed about how close my Indian brother-in-law was to being nuked. My conclusion: The Left is waiting for the US to pick a side, and then they can jump on the other. If we side with India, they can recycle all their Israel-Palestine opinions. If we side with Pakistan, they can search their many files of opinions on US support of military dictatorships to find the best ones to recycle. They could berate the US for not getting involved, but since this is an ongoing situation, they would then have to PICK A SIDE THEMSELVES, and say what the US SHOULD do. Better to wait for disaster to happen, and THEN criticize the US for not intervening. (For obviously racist reasons.)

Delusions II

Arab-Islamic World Is a Hostage of Its Own Delusions by Leon de Winter

Anyone who follows the developments in the Arab Islamic world will be struck by the complete absence of self-knowledge and introspection that characterizes these vexed cultures. Almost every problem is attributed to hostile external forces. The poverty and underdevelopment that plague most of the Arab world are the result of malicious machinations of Americans and Jews. This is no less true of the disaster in Darfur. Last week UPI reported that the Sudanese foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail had told journalists in Cairo that his government possessed "information that confirms media reports of Israeli support (for the rebels in Darfur)." He added that he was "sure the next few days will reveal a lot of Israeli contacts with the rebels."

via aldaily

Old media

John R. Levine's Airline information on-line is far superior to the NYT article I mentioned below. In fact, it's clear the reporter doesn't know the half of it. Talk about old media.

poor peasants

Via the Gweilo Diaries: Policies, corruption widening rich-poor divide

One of the core problems, says [Wenran] Jiang, [professor of political science at the University of Alberta], is the two-class system that favours urbanites and urban development.

'The rural population is being exploited to subsidise the urban population,' he said.

Whereas most industrialised countries give big state subsidies to the agricultural sector, in China the reverse is true.

Farmers have four times the tax burden of city dwellers and none of the benefits available to many in the cities, such as subsidised education and health care and unemployment benefits.

And it is almost impossible for them to become official urban residents, though millions have migrated to cities for low-paying jobs with little legal protections.

'The Chinese government has made policy choices . . . that made the majority of Chinese people worse off, or relatively worse,' said Jiang. 'The consequences of such a policy choice, making most people poorer to let them subsidise urban development, are a potential time bomb for social instability.'

What's wrong with outsourcing?

Unlike NPR's morning edition, Marketplace identifies the Institute mentioned below as a nonprofit liberal research group, and goes on to interview Professor Lawrence White, who explains a CEO's job is to make a company more efficient, but that another problem is that while American CEO's are often over paid, the problem is that their pay doesn't have any connection to their performance. Neither White nor the study's author acknowledge that "outsourcing" jobs overseas is a minor problem.

outsourcing jobs overseas, or "offshoring," accounts for just a small fraction of the many millions of jobs that are lost each year even in a good economy.

...only 2.5 percent of major layoffs in the first three months of 2004 were a result of outsourcing abroad.

Over time, offshoring is beneficial:

In the short run, an increase in offshoring reduces U.S. job growth. But in the long run it improves the standard of living, increases real wages, and increases the country's economic growth.

...over the past decade the US economy lost an overall total of about 15 million jobs each year for all reasons, while creating an average of about 17 million new jobs each year - a huge rate of "churn" as countless businesses fail or downsize while others grow or are created.

...when companies move some jobs abroad the savings stimulate job creation at home...

In the initial phases of IT offshoring there is a loss of jobs, but the overall impact on the economy will be favorable. Because companies are paying lower costs, they have more money for investment which leads to an increased demand for labor. This does not indicate a 1-to-1 ratio of jobs gained to those lost, however the overall economy will benefit from offshoring.

...the US gains more from "insourcing" of jobs than it loses from outsourcing....in 2002, the most recent year on record, the US exported $29 billion in "business services" while importing less than $11 billion....the jobs that are being gained are generally higher-paying jobs than those that are being lost.

(Note that while these people are apparently willing to countenance "outsourcing" to other Americans, they feel it's wrong to let goddam foreigners have them.) What's wrong with outsourcing? Not much.

In the dark all cats are grey

I hadn't realized "In the dark all cats are grey" was from Benjamin Franklin's Old Mistresses' Apologue (nor did I realize there was a sexual connotation). At least this guy credits Franklin. Was Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 reading that? 不管白猫黑猫，会捉老鼠就是好猫。(It doesn't matter whether it's a black cat or a white cat; as long as it catches mice it's a good cat.)

Update
In his comment to the story 驅怪 in Liaozhai 聊齋, Pu Songling says, 黃狸黑狸，得鼠者雄. ("It does not matter whether a racoon dog is yellow or black, as long as it catches rats.") I'm not the only one to see the similarity with Deng's pronouncement.

In a subscriber-only article, the Economist argues that aside from Bush's foreign policy and pursuit of big-government spending, he worringly

...has increased the power of the presidency at the expense of other branches of government...

In January 2003, the White House sent Congress a proposal for reform of the health-care system. The price tag, it said, was $400 billion. The real cost was $534 billion. Medicare's chief actuary was told not to answer congressional questions on pain of dismissal. After the House and Senate passed different versions of the proposal, the Republicans began work to reconcile the two. They refused to let five of the Democrats nominated to the process take part in deliberations—and rewrote the bill.

Even then, they fell short of a majority when voting began, at 3am. Defying precedent, the House leadership held the vote open for three hours while arms were twisted. The bill finally passed just before 6am. Norm Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called it the ugliest breach of congressional standards in modern history...

Even if you think the ends are good, the means have inflicted institutional harm on Congress. The committee system for amending bills has all but collapsed. Bills are now written by the leaders and their staffs, in concert with the White House. Debate is often cut off: many controversial measures are voted on under a “closed rule”, which bars amendments. The conference stage, when different versions of a bill are reconciled, has been turned from an occasion for compromise into yet another opportunity for partisan gain. Sometimes the conference committee does not meet at all. Sometimes Republicans have ignored the rule that says the committee can only iron out differences, and have fundamentally altered bills at the last minute. The budget process is in tatters.

As for Congress's other main job—oversight of the administration—that has declined too, with a few exceptions (the Senate Armed Services Committee held useful hearings on the Abu Ghraib scandal). Serious investigation has been left to special commissions, such as the one that looked into the September 11th attacks. The responsibility for this lies largely with congressional Republicans: they are reluctant to investigate one of their own...

The power of the president is limited not only by the might of Congress but by a host of smaller laws and administrative rules: freedom-of-information requests, the power to classify documents, and civil-service procedures. Partly in response to domestic security worries, the discretionary power of the executive has increased substantially in these areas.

The best-known examples come from the Patriot Act, which boosted law-enforcement powers and surveillance. That act, at least, was passed by Congress and is subject to congressional review. More commonly, the administration has increased its powers by asserting them. Soon after September 11th, Mr Ashcroft issued new guidelines on freedom-of-information requests. The attorney-general reversed the Clinton-era policy of rejecting such requests only if to allow them would cause "substantial harm". Public-interest groups complain that requests are now often denied, even over matters that seem to have nothing to do with security, such as pollution or car safety.

According to figures from the National Archives, around 44m documents were classified in the first two years of the current administration—as many as in the whole of Mr Clinton's second term. More officials—including, for some reason, the secretary of agriculture—have been given the power to classify materials...

A subset of this reaction against scrutiny is the use of what might be called government by small print: slipping additions into law at the last minute or tinkering with the wording of rules that implement laws. As a recent series in the Washington Post argued, such changes often appear minor but can have a big impact. By changing the word “waste” to “fill” in a rule governing coal-mining, for instance, the administration allowed an increase in strip-mining in West Virginia. By adding two sentences about scientific evidence to an unrelated budget bill, it gave itself increased authority to rule in regulatory disputes.

Perhaps the most disturbing way in which the administration has increased its power has been through its public-relations machine. Thomas Jefferson said long ago that a well-informed electorate is the most important constraint on government. By issuing partial and sometimes misleading information, the Bush administration has hampered such scrutiny.

Consider for instance the arguments for tax cuts. Here, Mr Bush made claims about the cost of the cuts and their distributional impact that he should have known were misleading. In 2000, he claimed the first round of cuts would cost $1.6 trillion over ten years, a quarter of the budget surplus at that point. On his own figures, the share was a third, not a quarter, and he arrived at the figure only through outrageous accounting gimmicks that he is now campaigning to forbid.

Meanwhile, Amity Shlaes argues that Bush's economic plans move the U.S. from an entitlement society to a stakeholder society. OK, but what about Bush's deficit? On the other hand, who knows what Kerry's going to do.

NPR's liberal slant

NPR just cited a report about the pay of executives at companies that have engaged in outsourcing. Since this is a "news" item, it's not hard to guess what that pay is going to be. The report is from what NPR calls the "non-profit" Institute for Policy Studies, but it doesn't tell us about their liberal slant.

Our non-candidate candidates

Mike Lawrence writes on Lloyd Karmeier and Gordon Maag. He says they

have been obligated to wear the Lady of Justice's blindfold. Now the two southern Illinois jurists, competing in what is likely the hottest race ever for a state Supreme Court seat, are donning muzzles.

Welcome to an Alice-in-Wonderland world where judicial aspirants are essentially compelled to campaign without acting like candidates. They must contend without contentiousness, discuss issues without committing, build campaign treasuries supposedly without knowing the identities of major benefactors and carry Republican or Democratic banners without waving them...

Nevertheless, there is too much at stake in their 5th Judicial District face-off for the candidates to monopolize the messages. Because the district includes Madison County, widely considered a haven for those filing personal-injury lawsuits and a hellhole for their targets, combatants in the tort reform war are choosing favorites and preparing for combat. The outcome will either embolden Maag-backing lawyers depicting themselves as warriors for victims' rights or energize Karmeier-boosting business leaders blaming the Supreme Court for knocking down laws that discourage frivolous lawsuits and unreasonable damage awards. Moreover, a Republican victory would give the GOP another spot on the Democratic-dominated tribunal, which occasionally referees highly partisan fights.

Republican Karmeier, a circuit court judge, must ponder every public utterance; so must Democrat Maag, an appellate court justice. But business groups and health-care providers won't hesitate to tag Maag as an ally of greedy attorneys who have been chasing doctors out of southern Illinois, and trial lawyers won't blush at labeling Karmeier a tool of big, bad business.

Here's a rating of the two of them by the Illinois State Bar Association.

unfair, impolite, unsubtle, unwise, obnoxious, tendentious, and maddeningly self-contradictory

In Critical Reception: The Meaning of 'Fahrenheit 9-11', Irfan Khawaja writes,

Moore’s film, we’re told, is unfair, impolite, unsubtle, unwise, obnoxious, tendentious, and maddeningly self-contradictory — all [A.O.] Scott’s terms, not mine. And yet, Scott insists, Moore is a "credit to the republic" for having made the film despite this. It seems not to have occurred to Scott that once you concede that crap like Fahrenheit 9/11 is a "credit to the republic," you’ve already conceded that the republic is itself a piece of crap — at which point it seems futile to insist that the film is but "a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power."

When you boil down the posturing of the Moore-boosting genre, you find at last a very strange and hypocritical exercise in special pleading and excuse-making. What Moore’s quasi-defenders are telling us is that an illogical, dishonest and tendentious film offers an inarticulate indictment of an evil Administration. The trouble is, if we take this morally confused verdict at face value, we reach not an indictment but an equivalence — not the intended conclusion that Moore’s film is "worth seeing and debating" but the rather different conclusion that Michael Moore is morally on par with George Bush, and that his film has all of the moral credibility of an ad for the Bush campaign. Is that really where these people want to go?

via Will Wilkinson.

The Chinese Invented Computers.

I actually saw a gizmo in Taiwan once that had both an abacus and an electronic calculator. This image is from here.

The Voice Behind Me

There is a lovely little horror story about the peasant who started through the haunted wood--the wood that was, people said, inhabited by devils who took any mortal who came their way. But the peasant thought, as he walked slowly along,

I am a good man and have done no wrong. If devils can harm me then there isn't any justice.

A voice behind him said, "There isn't."

I hear that voice all the time. This anecdote starts off "A Voice Behind Him", by Fredric Brown (1906-1972), reprinted in Carnival of crime.

Bye-bye, Taiwanese independence

Across Asia, Beijing's Star Is in Ascendance By JANE PERLEZ

China's presence mostly translates into money, and the doors it opens. But more and more, China is leveraging its economic clout to support its political preferences.

Beijing is pushing for regional political and economic groupings it can dominate, like a proposed East Asia Community that would cut out the United States and create a global bloc to rival the European Union. It is dispersing aid and, in ways not seen before, pressing countries to fall in line on its top foreign policy priority: its claim over Taiwan....

Among the most nervous is Singapore. China publicly scolded the new prime minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, before his inauguration in August, for visiting Taiwan, where Singapore trains its soldiers, even though his father, Lee Kwan Yew, had visited Taiwan many times. China said it would delay trade talks as a punishment.

The gravity of the threat was not lost on Mr. Lee. In his first major speech in August, the new prime minister hastily reaffirmed Singapore's support for a "one China" policy on Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province....

Most countries in the region, like Thailand, are already on board with China's claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, and some in Australia worry that China is quickly chipping away at the last holdouts.

I'm not saying this is a good thing, just what looks like happening. And some of the Asians are going to regret this, unless they learn how to play the Chinese off against the Americans.

Even as America's position erodes, its policies - on Iraq, North Korea, weapons proliferation - have tended to push China and its neighbors together. Not least among the shared interests is a "mutual concern about the unilateralism" of current American policy, said Muhammad Noordin Sopiee, chairman of Malaysia's Institute of Strategic and International Studies.

"They need regional friendship, we need regional friendship," he said of the Chinese. "They need time to develop their economy, so do we. They need protection from the United States and so do we."

Unilateralism? Wait'll you see how the Chinese behave.

Nothing new

Tracking Down Cheap Air Fares By SUSAN STELLIN

In general, you can often find lower fares by traveling on Tuesday or Wednesday, when planes are less crowded and cheap seats are more likely to be available....

For learning about special sales, SmarterLiving.com is a good Web site....Most of the Web specials are for travel within two weeks of purchase, so they are best for last-minute escapes, but SmarterLiving does track other airline sales.

...most Web sites don't make it easy to search for flights into or out of several airports. One that does is www.itasoftware.com, which lets you search airports at distances ranging from 25 to 300 miles of your first choice.

She also mentions Orbitz and Expedia but not travelocity. What? no commission?

Black hyphenization

'African-American' Becomes a Term for Debate By RACHEL L. SWARNS

...in the 1960's after changes in federal immigration law led to increased migration from Africa and Latin America, have been accompanied in some places by fears that newcomers might eclipse native-born blacks. And they have touched off delicate musings about ethnic labels, identity and the often unspoken differences among people who share the same skin color...

Sociologists say foreign-born blacks from majority-black countries are less psychologically handicapped by the stigma of race. Many arrive with higher levels of education and professional experience. And sociologists say they often encounter less discrimination...

"We've suffered so much that we're a bit weary and immigration seems like one more hurdle we will have to climb," said [Bobby] Austin [an administrator at the University of the District of Columbia], 59, who traces his ancestors back to slavery. "People are asking: 'Will I have to climb over these immigrants to get to my dream? Will my children have to climb?'

"These are very aggressive people who are coming here," said Dr. Austin, who is calling for a frank dialogue between native-born and foreign-born blacks. "I don't berate immigrants for that; they have given up a lot to get here. But we're going to be in competition with them. We have to be honest about it. That is one of the dividing lines."

Mr. [Barack] Obama says such arguments do not reflect the views of black Americans who have joined forces over the years with Africans and people from the Caribbean to fight colonialism and poverty.

So fighting colonialism takes precedence over dealing with the corrupt thugs that govern former colonies?

...The term African-American has crept steadily into the nation's vocabulary since 1988, when the Rev. Jesse Jackson held a news conference to urge Americans to use it to refer to blacks.

"It puts us in our proper historical context," Mr. Jackson said then, adding in a recent interview that he still favored the term. "Every ethnic group in this country has a reference to some land base, some historical cultural base. African-Americans have hit that level of cultural maturity."

I'm not sure I understand, but I think "ethnic group" is a code word for minority--if it's not, Americans of British ancestry ought to see themselves as Anglo-Americans, and I don't think we do. As a matter of fact, I'm not so sure every third- or fourth-generation Italian- or Irish-American cares much about their ancestry. As a matter of fact, I know a few Chinese-Americans who care less about Chinese culture than I do.

Obesity

A recent study about a possible link between sugary drinks leading to obesity and then diabetes concludes,

our findings suggest that frequent consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages may be associated with larger weight gain and increased risk of type 2 diabetes, possibly by providing excessive calories and large amounts of rapidly absorbable sugars. Public health strategies to prevent obesity and type 2 diabetes should focus on reducing sugar-sweetened beverage consumption.

This sounds a little odd to me. How can they be sure it's just the sugar, and not the diet as a whole?

Ruth Kava from the American Council on Science and Health points out

Rather than attributing the increases in weight and diabetes occurrence to the increase in calories from drinking additional sugar-sweetened beverages, the authors seem to blame the sugar in the drinks. Women who increased their sugar-sweetened beverage consumption from less than one per week to more than one per day added over 350 calories to their average daily energy intake. No matter where those calories came from, they would lead to additional weight. An important comparison is lacking here: the authors should have compared the weight gain and cases of diabetes in women who had an equivalent increase in calories from eating foods.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. C.M. Apovian noted that the women who had higher intakes of sugar-sweetened soft drinks also tended to have other lifestyle factors that could have contributed to their weight gain and increased disease risk. Such women tended to be less physically active, to smoke more, and to have higher total calorie intake and lower intake of protein and fiber. In other words, their overall lifestyle was less healthful than that of women who didn't increase their soft drink consumption.

Apovian's editorial is subscriber-only, even though the Journal of the American Medical Association claims its mission to be "To Promote the Science and Art of Medicine and the Betterment of Public Health". By keeping info out of the grubby hands of the public, I guess.

Iain Murray links to The Economics of Obesity, a fascinating article in The Public Interest by economists Inas Rashad and Michael Grossman on the causes of American obesity.

Obesity and sedentary lifestyles accounted for approximately 400,000 deaths in 2000 compared to 435,000 from cigarette smoking, 100,000 from alcohol abuse, and 20,000 from illegal drug use. Obesity costs more in annual medical care expenditures than cigarette smoking — around $75 billion in 2003 — because of the long and costly treatments for its complications. A large percentage of these costs are borne by Medicare, Medicaid, private health-insurance companies, and ultimately by the population at large rather than by the obese....

According to the economists Darius Lakdawalla and Tomas Philipson, declines in the real prices of grocery food items caused a surge in caloric intake that can account for as much as 40 percent of the increase in the body mass index of adults since 1980. Technological advances in agriculture caused grocery prices to fall, the authors show, and these declines caused consumers to demand more groceries. Government policy only heightened the effect by encouraging overproduction. Journalist Michael Pollan points to a shift in the early 1970s toward direct farming subsidies as another source of the rise in caloric intake. The old system, an agricultural-support arrangement designed to discourage overproduction of corn and other storable commodities, had much smaller effects on producers’ decisions. But the new system "free[d] them to dump their harvests on the market no matter what the price."

Important technological changes in the home kitchen seem to have fostered more caloric intake, too....Microwaveable meals and other foods that are easy to cook are desirable because they are quicker to prepare; they are also fattier and higher in caloric content...

Other factors that have contributed to the growth in obesity include the decline in physical activity and urban sprawl. Physical exercise has declined since 1980, and that decline is a proximate cause of the increase in body weight.

[However], eating out at fast-food restaurants and full-service restaurants seems to be the most important factor in explaining the rise in obesity.

...as much as two-thirds of the increase in adult obesity since 1980 can be explained by the rapid growth in the per capita number of fast-food restaurants and full-service restaurants, especially the former. It’s not hard to imagine how the explosive growth in these restaurants could fuel the obesity epidemic. Food served in these restaurants has extremely high caloric density, and almost certainly has contributed to obesity...

Indeed, the economists Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Phillip B. Levine find that the rise in average hours worked by mothers can account for as much as one-third of the growth in obesity among children in certain families. In part, the rise in obesity seems to have been an unintended consequence of encouraging women to become more active in the workforce.

We have also unmasked a second and perhaps more surprising culprit in the alarming rise in obesity: the crackdown on smoking via tax increases. Higher cigarette taxes and higher cigarette prices have caused more smokers to quit — but these smokers seem to have begun eating more as a result. According to our research, each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal...

Our findings underscore the idea that social action can have unintended consequences: Oftentimes, there is a tradeoff involved in achieving goals that society favors, such as increased food production, more workforce participation by women, and fewer smokers. Lower real food prices have significantly increased living standards. Expanded labor market opportunities for women have increased families’ command of real resources and increased equality of opportunity. Cigarette smoking is still the largest cause of premature death among Americans; pushing smokers to quit will have obvious health benefits. But our results and those of other economists also suggest that these efforts contribute to the rising prevalence of obesity. Whether public policies should be pursued that offset this ignored consequence of previous public policy to discourage smoking, increase market opportunities, and make cheaper food available depends on the costs and benefits of these policies...

...the non-obese do subsidize the obese. Health and life insurance premiums paid by the latter do not fully reflect their higher medical care costs and their higher probability of death.

Their solutions?

Raising premiums for the obese could correct this externality, but would raise considerable equity concerns given that obesity has such a large genetic component. Imposition of taxes on “junk food,” fast food, or food with a high caloric content might be viewed as a substitute, since the consumption of these types of food is a conscious choice made by individuals. But this policy imposes costs on people who consume these types of food in moderation, too...

Giving benefits to people who exercise and subsidizing facilities and programs for them might be a more promising approach...

Would the people of the past, who toiled through their workdays and often did not have enough food, have predicted this problem? Would those who once dreamed of ending poverty and supplying enough food for all have even imagined that being too fat would become the predominant health risk nationwide?

The main message of contemporary research is that there is no free lunch, that with benefits come costs. Positive changes such as increases in technology, reduced smoking, and increased female participation in the labor force have also carried unforseen negative consequences. Was the anti-smoking campaign a mistake if it also encouraged obesity?

Murray also links to a profile of Soso Whaley, who

imposed a limit of 1,800 to 2,000 calories when she started her diet April 1. But her intake would increase up to 3,000 calories "when I gave myself the day off," she said.

She dropped 10 pounds from her 5-foot-3-inch frame in the first month of her experiment, slimming down to 165 from 175. Her cholesterol level fell to 197 from 237 by the beginning of May.

Like Mr. Spurlock, Ms. Whaley said she tried every item on the menu at least once. But she spent about an hour doing moderate exercise three times a week.

Although she did have salads, Ms. Whaley said she stuck with sandwiches, fries, diet sodas and shakes.

"I actually had a much tougher time when I got back in the real world [in May] because I was so used to controlled portion sizes" at the burger chain, she said.

But don't forget GINA KOLATA's The Fat Epidemic: He Says It's an Illusion

Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, argues that contrary to popular opinion, national data do not show Americans growing uniformly fatter.

Instead, he says, the statistics demonstrate clearly that while the very fat are getting fatter, thinner people have remained pretty much the same...

Dr. Friedman points to careful statistical analyses of the changes in Americans' body weights from 1991 to today by Dr. Katherine Flegal of the National Center for Health Statistics. At the lower end of the weight distribution, nothing has changed, not even by a few pounds. As you move up the scale, a few additional pounds start to show up, but even at midrange, people today are just 6 or 7 pounds heavier than they were in 1991. Only with the massively obese, the very top of the distribution, is there a substantial increase in weight, about 25 to 30 pounds, Dr. Flegal reported...

Over the years, Dr. Friedman says, he has watched the scientific data accumulate to show that body weight, in animals and humans, is not under conscious control. Body weight, he says, is genetically determined, as tightly regulated as height. Genes control not only how much you eat but also the metabolic rate at which you burn food. When it comes to eating, free will is an illusion.

"People can exert a level of control over their weight within a 10-, perhaps a 15-pound range," Dr. Friedman said. But expecting an obese person to decide to simply eat less and exercise more to get below the obesity range, below the overweight range? It virtually never happens, he said. Any weight that is lost almost invariably comes right back.

The same goes for gaining weight in general, Dr. Friedman argued. A person who has the genes to be thin is not going to get fat because portion sizes increase. It makes no scientific sense, he said.

But isn't it true that we can decide to eat or not, choosing to skip dinner, say, or pass up dessert? Isn't that free will? Not really, Dr. Friedman said. The control mechanisms for body weight operate over months, even years, not day to day or meal to meal.

"People live in the moment," he said. "They lose weight over the short term and say that they have exercised willpower," but over the long term, the body's intrinsic controls win out. And just as willpower cannot make fat people thin, a lack of it does not make thin people fat.

But a word of caution. As the article notes, Friedman discovered the gene for leptin, whose absence made mice grow massively obese. In other words, he wants to believe that genes are the culprit.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone for President

Sharon Waxman on their new puppet movie.

After 9/11, they, like many others, could not understand why people around the world seemed to hate America, nor why so many liberals seemed bent on criticizing everything it does. Three years later, Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone say they hate the war in Iraq, but suspect it might be necessary. They think President Bush is stupid, but they can't stand John Kerry either. "We hate both of them," Mr. Parker confirmed. "They're both retards. We have to choose between a" — four-letter word — "sandwich and a" — same four-letter word — "sandwich." O.K., so they're not exactly nuanced.

But they know their own limitations. The filmmakers are trying to knock piety off the moral high ground. But they would never try to take its place.

"An actor convinces himself he's doing something important to the world," said Mr. Stone, who is 33 and has yet to work with one. "You're an actor; all you do is read lines. And here's Janeane Garofalo on CNN: `We are being silenced.' I can't turn on the TV without hearing Michael Moore's voice. And he's being silenced?"

"We never get silenced," said Mr. Parker, 34. "People are always throwing money at us. I wish someone would silence us so we could take a frigging vacation."...

Mr. Parker and Mr. Stone approached every scene with a WWJBD ethos: What Would Jerry Bruckheimer Do? The puppets bleed when they are shot. In the middle of every huge action sequence, there is a moment — complete with a soundtrack of tender, swelling strings — when two Team America agents confess their love, just before one gets killed. And when the Sphinx cracks in two, it falls directly on the bad guys' jeep — crushing a young boy in the process.

I may never see the movie, though. I'm not a fan of puppets.

Right wing can be wrong

Jeff Jarvis writes

I've long been amazed at Bush's insistence on playing to his right wing. He certainly wasn't voted by a mandate! He did not have a right-wing revolution behind him. He gained strength across the board because of 9/11. If he had played to the center, he might have had a chance of getting votes he never could have gotten before (see: me) but he turned away those voters by swinging further right by appointing Ashcroft and lately by pushing the edge on gay marriage, stem-cell research, and by not pulling back his Vietnam attack hawks ... well, you know the list. I used to think this was ideology but now I wonder whether it is odd political paranoia: a chronic need to "solidify the base."

Yeah, I don't get it, either.